Elsword Online Overview

North American gamers are finally able to get their hands on Elsword, a side-scroller similar to Grand Chase and Fists of Fu. With a manga series already running in Asia, Elsword is a popular franchise which offers players story-driven action with various co-op missions. There’s also a PvP mode where gamers can battle each other and compete for rankings. Equip your character with an assortment of gear, accessories, and cosmetic items earned as you progress!

Characters:

Elsword - A master swordsman with powerful melee attacks. He can deal damage, but also adsorb a lot of it.

Aisha - A mage who relies on active skills in deal damage to opponents. Armed with a staff, she can attack multiple targets at once.

Rena - A trained marksman, Rena’s favored weapon is the bow and arrow. She is also capable of kicking opponents who get too close.

Raven - Raven excels in close combat as he uses his Nasod arm to strike down enemies with a single blow to those who dare get near him. He also uses his sword to slice up anything in his path in order to build up all sorts of combos to tear down the enemy.

Eve - Eve may not look tough like the others, but she uses her powers of machinery to take down enemy forces for her. Since Eve is the Queen of Nasod, she can summon robots from her Kingdom to aid her in her battle whenever she wishes. Eve also uses Nasod Gears that can transform into all sorts of weapons to defend herself in battle, ranging from spears to explosives.

Chung - Chung has the strength and power to easily wield a Cannon skillfully as it were a feather. If his enemy is too far from him, Chung also has a unique trait to him different from others, as he uses “ammo” which can be fired from his Cannon after reloading.

Ara Haan - Ara Haan brings some of the best hybrid mechanics to Elsword yet. While technically classified as a melee fighter, her agility and long range skills and auto attack strengths combined with her low base defense and health stats will pidgeonhole most players into utilizing her more along the lines of an aggressive mid-range character similar to Rena’s Nightwatcher path.

Elesis - Elesis is a powerhouse that brings speedy initiation and hard hitting melee combos to the game. As Elsword’s older sister, she represents the family heritage well as the hardest hitting character in the game. Being reliant on both a Chivalry meter as well as expensive mana skills though, her true power might only be unlocked by a veteran player.

Add – Add, “the Tracer,” is a brilliant mechanic. He uses the Nasod Dynamo, using electric-based magic damage and a special Dynamo Point system instead of Awakening. Add is flexible for both close and long range battles, and can use homing attacks.

Elsword Online Screenshots

Elsword Online Featured Video

Full Review

Elsword Transformation Review Update

By Taylor Lux

ElHistory

Elsword is a side-scrolling, fast-paced, fighting MMORPG developed by KOG Studios. When the game was originally created, it was to be a reboot of fellow side-scroller Grand Chase, another creation of KOG Studios. Elsword (the character), Aisha, and Rena were near identical to characters from Grand Chase, but were scrapped when different producers took on Elsword. Because of this reboot mentality, there are many similarities to Grand Chase; however, there are a few key differences, such as the job class system, that it diverges quite a bit from its predecessor.

Nexon published the game initially, releasing it in South Korea on December 27, 2007 and it has been free-to-play since launch. Many different publishers have taken the mantle to bring Elsword to many different countries, such as NHN Japan, Gamania, and Kill3rCombo, which allowed releases in Taiwan (10/23/2009), Hong Kong (11/9/2009), Japan (3/17/2010), and North America (3/23/2011). Elsword also has had 6 manwas written that take place within the story of the game itself called ElType, 4 are focused on the “El Search Party” while 2 are centered on the character Chung.

Gaming Nostalgia

When I began playing Elsword, I had not realized that side-scrolling MMORPGs existed. It reminded me of the NES days, but more specifically that of a Zelda game where it hybridized RPGs with side-scrolling. The nostalgia took a back seat once I started to delve deeper into the mechanics of managing my MP, aiming my shots to maximum effectiveness, and utilizing various attack combos to slowly climb my combo meter higher and higher.

Spells and special skills use both an MP and a cool down system. When in cooling, there is a countdown that lets you know exactly how much longer you need to wait until it can be used again, which is useful for those long cool down abilities. Combos use a collection of “Z” and “X” along with direction keys. The best part for new players is once you have started using a combo key, it instantly expands your entire possible tree of combos and highlights as you continue along your combo. You gain more combos as you gain new classes, so there is still some learning when you achieve those changes.

El Search Party

The possible playable characters are limited to 6 possible choices, each gender locked. However, each character is not a cookie cutter mold of each other, as at level 15 each playable character has the choice of taking up one of 3 advanced classes which advances further at level 35 with a story arc for each class advancement. You have Elsword, the great sword wielding adventurer; Aisha, the former greatest mage of Elrios; Rena, an elven ranger who protects her allies with a bow; Raven, an atoning swordsman with a Nasod claw for a left arm; Eve, a Nasod who wants to bring the coexistence of humans and Nasods; and finally Chung, the nobleman who wields a giant cannon as if it were nothing.

Let’s Play Dress Up!

There’s a large lack of customization in the game, outside of playing dress up with the characters. The characters are gender locked; their hairstyles and colors are locked as well. However, the money store comes with costume pieces that you can wear over whatever equipment you’re actually wearing to maintain a set look, though without it you’ll constantly be mix and matching colors and gear types based on what you pick up along the way. One nice feature though that other titles in the F2P spectrum often lack is the ability to mix cash shop pieces with actual gear to create a hybrid look rather than just being naked wherever any of your pieces lack a cash shop covering.

There is one unique thing I did notice. You can actually press F6 and change the view of yourself and all other players into a Chibi art mode when not in a dungeon. This mode disregards all equipment, but it does make for a cute and funny looking approach to heavy populated areas such as towns. It’s a nice way to improve performance while also sidestepping the usual graphics of everyday MMOs or even other side scrolling RPGs where everyone is very humanoid looking.

Once More unto the Breach, My Friends

Ah yes, the quests. It’s quite easy to find the quests, with people on the map with large yellow exclamation points floating over their heads. There are many times where you have to replay levels in order to finish quests, though on different difficulties. Each level has 3 difficulties, Normal, Hard, and Intense. In order to help figure out where a quest is, when you click on the map of the different areas there’s a large golden Q on top of the level. Since some quests must be accomplished on harder difficulties, they add the golden Q to indicate that you’ve chosen an appropriate map and difficulty level to accomplish your activated quest. It might seem like a small benefit but you’ll be glad when it saves you from having to grind out an easy map only to realize you wasted your time.

Teaming is actually quite easy in Elsword. Even if you’re going to solo, you have to create your own team. If you create a team, you can leave the designed member count on 4 and then people can click “Join Team” to quickly jump in. The creation of your team is automatically broadcasted so you won’t have to put much effort into finding party members if you want to. After your new teammates join and click ready, you’re all set to start the countdown for the actual quest. The group stays together after the boss is defeated and can either do another quest or leave the team. From my experience, it most common for a group would disband instantly after the quest was complete.

Verdict: Good

The old side scrolling nostalgia was really what I enjoyed the most of Elsword. The lack of customization was a large drawback for me, though the expanding classes from the base characters did help some. The customizable fashion idea is something that I enjoy on the surface, but it really should allow you to overlay regular equipment you like aesthetically while maintaining the better gear’s stats. Their systems for teaming and questing made joining up with others in the community and avoiding running unnecessary maps a snap. Overall the game offers just enough nostalgia, skill-based combat, dress-up, and Manwa story-telling to keep its target audience enthusiastic for each update.

Elsword Review (prior to Transformation series)

By: Guillaume Barbeau

Let’s say it now: Elsword is a beautiful game. Hand-drawn cutscenes, cell-shaded graphics and flashy effects, all using bright, vivid colors, make for a very satisfying visual experience. You start out in the character creator where you choose your name along with your preferred persona. Considering the differences between each of the characters, this is a fairly important step; Elsword is the melee/tank character, Aisha is a mage with the capacity of attacking a lot of foes at once, and Rena is the long ranged character (Who could also be built for melee). The tutorial is complete, and accessible from the character menu afterward if you need a refresher. It explains efficiently the ins and outs of the system while peppering you with bits of the story, and introducing the characters to each other. Here you might also notice that Elsword indeed has voice acting, which is definitely an uncommon trait for free-to-play MMOs, and something we hope to see more. The sound in this game isn’t especially striking, the music is similar to other anime-ish games, and the sound effects are fair. The story is simple but deliberate in its style and pace; the anime inspirations ooze from every pixel.

Fire up your fighting spirit!

Profiting from previous experience with Grand Chase, KOG was successful in designing this combat system in a way that lessened the repetition slightly. To this end, they implemented a combo system which, depending on what key you hit (Z for light/fast hit, X for heavy), will chain up differently, and allow you to follow-up with special moves of your choice. The fighting here is truly the thick of the action, it’s fluid, fun, though a bit repetitive. Apart from combos, a significant part of the fighting system is the skill tree which has you put points into skills of your own choosing, some of which are entirely new special moves. One of these is a defensive move specific to each character, for an example, Aisha’s is a teleport,and Elsword’s is a counterattack block. These special moves use varying amounts of your mana bar(regenerated with time, or through fighting) to perform sort of “limit break” effects. You have four slots to put skills of your choosing, allowing you to diversify your play style, to a certain extent.

Wally’s Castle

The game essentially functions in the usual Kill X, Collect Y, go to Z fashion. You’ll acquire your quests in town, and then proceed to the outskirts of town where you create or join dungeon groups. Apart from PvP, all of the action happens in instanced, 4-players dungeons. These are fairly simple, go from point A to point B killing everything in-between, including a boss at the end. Before these, you may choose your preferred difficulty level, as many quests require you to play on Hard or Very Hard. This does not make much of a difference however, barring the time and length of the dungeon, and the difficulty remains fairly tame. A big part of the fun here comes from doing them in a group, as repeating dungeons solo turns them into a chore fairly quickly. The action truly shines in this instance, with flashy moves flying left and right, and bosses often going down to your teammates before you can even lift a finger. The PvP is just as entertaining, and much faster paced! The fighting happens in smaller arenas where you either compete in a free-for-all, or in a team deathmatch in which the objective is to have the best kill count. One strange thing about the action is how resilient the players are. Taking down a player takes a long time due to humongous amounts of hit-points, which tend to make matches longer, and slightly more tiresome than they need to be.

I’ll

From dungeons and PvP, you acquire XP, VP, and coins. The XP is used to level up (Surprise, surprise!), while the VP and coins are used in purchases. The character progression here is fairly fun, as the skill tree allows for slight divergence. Where the real fun starts however, is when you get to choose your progression path, at level 15. As an example, Elsword can become either a Sword Knight, or a Magic Knight, both which use different sets of skills, and have distinct appearances. Items in Elsword are divided in two: most items that carry significant statistics do not have an aesthetic counterpart. This means that if you put on a +30 Melee shirt, it will not physically show up on your character. Instead, your character’s appearance is decided by an alternate set of items. What this means is that you can look exactly like you want, without having to sacrifice item stats. Most of these items are acquired by…

Ka-ching!

Ka-ching is the in-game currency purchased with real money, whose main function seems to be either to purchase some of those appearance items, or utility items. There –is- a certain amount of stat gained from having these appearance items, which can range from being minimal; to being very significant(Some items allow you entirely new abilities, usable during PvP matches). There is a good variety toka-ching items, most certainly enough to keep you interested until new content arrives. Items can be sold in a sort of central, instanced market. You may also perform crafting, though this is not a skill in itself, as simply bring the material to a merchant in order to craft, or enhance an item. One thing must be mentioned about content however; it’s that the Korean version currently has –double- the amount of classes this version has, a detail that could make a significant difference in a player’s game experience.

Final Verdict: Good

Overall, this is a good game with a straight focus on flashy action and excellent looking graphics. It has a good pace, sharp action, and a healthy community, but is essentially very similar to Grand Chase,and other side-scrollers. That aside, if you can enjoy Elsword’s style and get past the eventual feeling of repetition from the dungeons, then small flaws like strange translations should be no issue to you. So grab up your sword, and fire up your fighting spirit!

Elsword: Crimson Avenger For Elesis Now Available - Posted on February 11, 2015KOG Games, a leading developer and publisher of popular free-to-play action MMORPGs, today announces the launch of the latest episode in the “Darkness is Coming” character series with the new, sultry 2nd Job for Elesis, Crimson Avenger.

Elsword: Dark Knight Elesis Now Available - Posted on January 28, 2015KOG Games, a leading developer and publisher of popular free-to-play action MMORPGs, today announces the launch of the shadowy new Job path for Elesis: Dark Knight.

Elsword Opens Path to Darkness with Ara Haan’s Little Specter Launch Event - Posted on December 17, 2014Ara Haan has spent every waking minute searching for a way to redeem her demon-possessed, disgraced brother. Obsessed with her goal, she’s overlooked the very power that has bolstered her immense strength: Eun, the Millennium Fox Spirit. Encased within the very hairpin that Ara keeps so close, Eun writhes inside an eternal prison.